Catalyst 11.8 drivers adopt stronger position against aliasing

AMD has uncorked yet another monthly driver update for its Radeon GPUs. This one, Catalyst 11.8, promises some tweaks to the Control Center interface, including the ability to overclock one's AMD GPU and CPU via the "Overdrive" panel in a single, Fusion-y software interface. There are also a number of in-game performance improvements, most of them related to anti-aliasing in some way. Here's the straight dope from AMD:

AMD Overdrive has been enhanced to include both CPU and GPU over-clocking controls within the AMD Vision Control Center

CPU over-clocking is only supported on AMD Black edition CPUs

Improves performance up to 10% in Crysis 2 DirectX 11 version for both non-Anti-Aliasing, and application enabled Anti-Aliasing cases on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 and AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series

Improves performance up to 8% in Fear 3 DirectX 11 version with application enabled Anti-Aliasing on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 and AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series

Improves performance up to 30% when AMD’s Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) is enabled through the Catalyst™ Control Center on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 and AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series

Improves performance up to 20% in Call of Duty Black Operations for single GPU and Multi-GPU configurations on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 and AMD Radeon™ HD 5000 Series

The claim of "up to 30%" improvements for MLAA is interesting. MLAA is basically just a post-process filter, so it's easily adjustable via software. Makes us wonder whether the algorithm has changed in a way that impacts the image output. Hmm.